I used to work for a consultancy called Trusted Information Systems, back in 1990-1994, which was a big contractor for DARPA and NSA. That was how I wound up building security systems in some pretty interesting places including the Clinton White House.
I’m not sanguine about the positive effects of gun control. There are lots of people stirring the pot, trying to think of effective measures, but I can pretty much guarantee that they are barking up the wrong tree.
It’s an interesting problem: if a federal agency claims the authority to regulate something, then they can be sued when they fail to discharge that responsibility effectively. My prediction is that this sort of thing won’t go far: there will be some new findings by the activist supreme court that there’s some theory like “qualified immunity” that applies.
“Kick it out,” said the voice from behind me; I waved back over my shoulder, not looking – this was another of the pan-handlers that worked Saint Paul Street in Baltimore. It was fall, 1993, and I was walking home from Harborplace downtown, with thenwife. The Saint Paul Street bridge over the Jones Falls Expressway, where we were, was usually whipped with wind and we had our hands jammed each in the pockets of our motorcycle jackets and were walking along, hunched over, probably talking about something.
The topic of self-defense in this ridiculously over-armed culture is a fraught one, with many contradictions. On one hand, there are the people who insist that “good guys with guns are needed to stop bad guys with guns” and on the other they implicitly assume that the police cannot be relied upon to be the “good guys” – thereby supporting the notion of armed vigilantism, e.g.: Bernie Goetz or (maybe) Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and many others.
I’m going to be a bit waffly in this posting, because it’s about something where some facts appear to be in dispute, leading to disputable conclusions. Also: psychologists are involved, which I believe increases a level of epistemological background noise, without adding much, if anything, in the way of things we can treat as facts.
These are a prank but, if they were made in black and had a holster for a small automatic, you could sell them as “tactical.”
Can we give Texas back to Mexico soon?
[Warning: Violence]
[Content Warning: Mass killing]